Cloud computing is rapidly changing the Internet into a collection of clouds, which provide a variety of computing resources, storage resources, and, in the future, a variety of resources that are currently unimagined. This new level of virtualization has unbounded or should have unbounded the physical and geographical limitations of traditional computing.
However, modern day data centers still have upwards of 80% excess computing and storage capacity reserved for purposes of handling unexpected computing and storage needs of customers/enterprises. That is, even with the advances in cloud computing, the data centers provided to or provided by an enterprise, via a cloud environment or otherwise, still set aside far too much computing and storage assets to account for unexpected demand, which may or may not ever be needed by the enterprise.
In addition, most allocations of computing and storage resources within a data center are governed by agreements between the data center provider and the consuming enterprise (or consuming departments within an enterprise). These agreements are in large part manually configured into the data center assets and are manually monitored and administered.
So, even with the advances of modern day cloud computing, the industry is still employing techniques that prohibit full efficiencies from being completely realized. That is, the enterprises that administer or consume data centers have not yet completely achieved true virtualization where the physical resources that underlie the data center are completely transparent to the enterprises.